Search engine war hots ups

AN INTERNET search engine war is under way after Yahoo! dumped rival Google from its in-house system.

Yahoo! made the announcement yesterday after long showing signs it wanted to cash in on the lucrative market.

Although a search engine itself, Yahoo! uses Google to look for information on the web.

Last year, it spent more than £1bn trying to find an alternative system for its own search engine. It invested a further £127m buying internet service provider Inktomi, which developed a search system similar to Google.

Yahoo! said it believed it could deliver a better quality web-searching service than rivals.

Google will be phased out on Yahoo! sites within weeks. To steal Yahoo!'s thunder, Google chose yesterday to announce its own site had just got bigger.

It now includes 6bn items - 4bn of which are web pages.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said: 'We are putting even more energy into our improvements and have turned up the notch on innovation a bit.'

A third contender is also joining the fight to be the No.1 search engine on the net.

Computer giant Microsoft plans to launch its own technology shortly.

The impending three-way battle highlights the value of searching on the net.

Google is by far the world's most popular search engine, used by seven in 10 web users.

Set up in 1998 by Larry Page and Mr Brin, it initially had a web index of 25m pages.